When "blogger" rhymes with "flogger"
Don't feel bad if you weren't invited to next week's Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. Billed as a big-think brainstorming session, Web 2 .0 is actually a three-day business-development party with a $3,000 entry fee. Attendees are there to find sales and partnering leads, and to boost publicity for their companies and products. Most of the "bloggers" who'll post from the show will be there to hawk either a product or their consulting services. No one wants to waste their time on you. Fine with me, but so far there's a lack of walk-the-talk participatory media from conference-goers.
With a week to go, only one registrant has posted to the Web 2.0 Summit Wiki:
Hi, I'm Mark Coker and I'll be covering Web 2.0 Summit for VentureBeat. I'm looking for scoops on new startups that haven't yet received press or blog coverage. If you're involved in a super-cool startup, drop me a note at mark underscore coker at sbcglobal dot net. You can see my previous stories at http://venturebeat.com/?s=coker Separate from VentureBeat, I'm founder of Dovetail Public Relations (http://www.dovetailpr.com ), a Silicon Valley tech pr firm. I'm also the founder of Smashwords, a stealth digital publishing startup.
See what I mean about attendees? He's a reporter! He's a publicist! And he's got a company he'd like to tell you about off the record.
Valleywag's editor asked for and received a press pass, but when I hit the conference's Facebook group I found only 16 members, of whom 12 are O'Reilly staff. In a way, I'm impressed that attendees aren't wasting their time playing We Media. At this date, they should be honing their sales pitches instead.
